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OpenAI bot remains undefeated against world’s greatest Dota 2 players

Last night, OpenAI’s Dota 2 bot beat the world’s most celebrated professional players in one-on-one battles, showing just how advanced these machine learning systems are getting.

The bot beat Danil “Dendi” Ishutin rather easily at The International, one of the biggest eSports events in the world, and remains undefeated against the world’s top Dota 2 players.

Elon Musk’s OpenAI trained the bot by simply copying the AI and letting the two play each other for weeks on end.

“We’ve coached it to learn just from playing against itself,” said OpenAI researcher Jakub Pachoki. “So we didn’t hard-code in any strategy, we didn’t have it learn from human experts, just from the very beginning, it just keeps playing against a copy of itself. It starts from complete randomness and then it makes very small improvements, and eventually it’s just pro level.”

To be clear, a 1v1 battle in Dota 2 is far less complex than an actual professional battle, which includes two teams of five players completing a variety of tasks simultaneously to achieve victory. But OpenAI said that’s working on another bot that could play against and alongside humans in a larger 5v5 battle.

Not shockingly, Elon Musk was watching along and had some thoughts of his own, calling unregulated AI vastly more dangerous than North Korea:

OpenAI first ever to defeat world’s best players in competitive eSports. Vastly more complex than traditional board games like chess & Go.

This isn’t the first time Elon Musk has spoken up about the dangers of AI without regulation. He said that the process of setting up a government body to regulate AI should start in the immediate future, speaking at the International Space Station R&D conference a few weeks ago.

Musk has also thrown shade at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Twitter, saying that Zuck’s understanding of AI is limited.

If you’re going to have a regulation now, either it applies to something and changes something in the world, or it doesn’t apply to anything. If it doesn’t apply to anything, what the hell do you have the regulation for? Tell me, what behavior do you want to change, Elon? By the way, let’s talk about regulation on self-driving Teslas, because that’s a real issue.